70-290 without experience?

Crucio666

Hey Guys,

I've been trying to study for my 70-290 exam for the past 2 years.

I've started off with 70-270 which i found easy. For the first year at my job all i did was mostly desktop support and minor server admin work.

Right after i took my 70-270 exam i started studying for my 70-290. This was a year ago. I had very little experience in servers at this time. I didn't understand a thing i was reading and couldnt apply it to my job.

It's now 2 years later and i'm now a full blown sysadmin (same job). I'm starting to study for my 70-290 again and it makes SO MUCH MORE SENSE NOW.

I don't know how people can pass these exams without actually working/dealing with servers on a daily basis.

I find it so much more easier to study knowing i can go into work the next day, try out what i learned on my servers, check out our current setup etc and apply it to my job.

I expect to take the exam in 2 weeks, i hope it all goes well!

gojericho0

I found that it really helps once you have some experience in what you are studying. I also found however that I can learn a lot about things I don't have experience in by studying for certifications. If I don't have the on the job experience, I usually try to compliment everything I learn in a lab then think out it would apply in our environment. Good luck in the test in a couple weeks!

leefdaddy

I believe most people that don't have hand on professional experience usually setup a lab at home to practice with. While it isn't quite the same, you can learn plenty in a lab environment.

Good luck with the test.

dynamik

Crucio, do you have any experience with VMWare or Virtual PC. Even though I run a Windows network, there are many things I don't come across or don't want to try (i.e. breaking something on seeing if I can fix it). VMs allow you to quickly and easily gain hands-on experience without having to have a sys admin job or risk damage to your actual network. Most modern machines will allow you to create a large enough virtual lab to carry out any of the tasks required to pass the exams. For example, I had four 2003 servers and two XP clients setup in various routing configurations while working on a 291 lab the other night.

mattd75

Crucio666 wrote:

I find it so much more easier to study knowing i can go into work the next day, try out what i learned on my servers, check out our current setup etc and apply it to my job.

I really feel like I have an advantage being able to use my VPN connection to access my work DC to see how things are set up (and use some of the things I am learning) as I work in my home lab (DC, Apps server and several Virtual pc's).

Tyrant1919

Hands on experience on an active network is the best. You can just observe everything in the big picture of things.

Nothing like finding out you just cut off about a thousand users from all internet browsing capabilities by simply changing a 'little' thing to see what it does. I was troubleshooting a DNS issue. I figured putting any old random DNS server as a forwarder on my external DNS would be 'fun'. That didn't help and I quickly flooded the helpdesk with users saying "My computer doesn't work." I also learned that I should notify my supervisor if I ever decide I need to change anything on an essential network server or device. It was all good though. I was thereby known as the guy that always breaks DNS. The fix for the DNS issue wasn't even DNS related.

Anyways, I feel labs are more then fulfilling for studying for an exam. But hands on outside of a lab is hands down better.

Good luck on 290, I'll be following you shortly.

snadam

Crucio666 wrote:

Hey Guys,

I've been trying to study for my 70-290 exam for the past 2 years.

I've started off with 70-270 which i found easy. For the first year at my job all i did was mostly desktop support and minor server admin work.

Right after i took my 70-270 exam i started studying for my 70-290. This was a year ago. I had very little experience in servers at this time. I didn't understand a thing i was reading and couldnt apply it to my job.

It's now 2 years later and i'm now a full blown sysadmin (same job). I'm starting to study for my 70-290 again and it makes SO MUCH MORE SENSE NOW.

I don't know how people can pass these exams without actually working/dealing with servers on a daily basis.

I find it so much more easier to study knowing i can go into work the next day, try out what i learned on my servers, check out our current setup etc and apply it to my job.

I expect to take the exam in 2 weeks, i hope it all goes well!

as far as that feeling you have, I felt the same way. I had a very similar experience to yours. Stuff just clicked after a year with hands-on experience. Though I should have taken this exam about 2 years ago (let alone the MCSA track), I finally passed this thing not too long ago. Personally, I think hands-on experience trumps all. But if you read the books along with the experience, it enhances the hands-on experience that much more. Congrats on the pass!

dynamik

I believe that everyone feels that hands-on experience in a live environment is superior to a lab environment. The point I was trying to make was that I don't see any real benefit in scraping together a few old PCs instead of simply using a virtual lab for practicing lab exercises; the experience is going to be virtually (no pun intended) identical. If you have some old equipment or just want to tinker with stuff, by all means, go for it. I just wouldn't encourage people to go out of their way to find it for their studies.

Tyrant1919

I dunno, I just picked up two poweredge 1550s and a 2450 for my tinkering pleasure :^). I love all the older dells cause we used to have a ton of them. I used the 2450 as my Openview server. I just couldn't pass up all 3 for $350, plenty of drives too. Can't wait to actually do the whole domain thingy with 'em all once I start hitting the MS exams.

famosbrown

Where did you find 3 of those for so cheap?

Tyrant1919

Craigslist.com, It's truely better then ebay. Since I'm in the Bay Area, it's probably more popular then ebay here.

2450 came with 4 36gb drives and each of the 1550's came with two 36gb drives. All have raid cards, one came with a fiber NIC too. 1550s are 1ghz pent 3s 512 RAM, 2450 has dual 1ghz pent 3s 2GB Ram. Nothing amazingly fast, but enough hard drives to play around with.